Reflections on University of Waterloo Engineering, admissions, teaching, and research

Toronto Engineering Program Enrollments

Waterloo Engineering has direct program admission, meaning that there is no general first year. The co-op program you start on day 1 is where you stay, unless some other path opens up to you and you take it. This also means that the number of students in each program is relatively stable from year 1 to 2 to 3, etc. A few drop out for various reasons along the way, but nothing too drastic.

Toronto Engineering has an interesting “hybrid” admission process, where some students are admitted directly to a program (like us), and some are admitted to a more general “Track One” program for first year. The Track One students move into other programs for 2nd year. I thought it might be interesting to see how that admissions approach affects program enrollments in 2nd year, and luckily they publish their data in their academic calendar so it’s easy to figure out. You just have to pick a calendar from a previous year, look at year 1 data, then pick the calendar for the following year and look at year 2 data to see the progression for a cohort of students. For the example I compiled below, I picked the 2014 and 2015 calendars.

Here is a graph I made of their numbers:

As we see in the graph, Track One had about 200 students in first year, and then none in second year (since they all went into other programs for second year). Where did they go? We see some small increases in Chemical and Civil, but much more dramatic increases in the enrollments for Computer, Industrial, and Mechanical Engineering programs. Electrical has a less dramatic increase, but still significant. There are some small decreases in Mineral and Materials Engineering, so I’m not sure what’s up with that. Complicating the picture, however, is Engineering Science.

The initial enrollment in Eng Sci is near 300, but it drops by almost 100 in second year. From my vague understanding, there is a path from Eng Sci to other programs in 2nd year too. So some of the program enrollment increases must be a combination of Track One and Eng Sci movements. In effect, Eng Sci acts somewhat like a “general” first year for some students that didn’t like it or weren’t successful enough to stay in it.

The other odd thing is that if you sum the numbers the total enrollment for 2014 (first year) was 1,235 and for second year (2015) was 1,255. Somewhere they picked up another 20 students, possibly from transfers or perhaps students who were repeating a year.

That’s about all the insights I can gather from this data. I don’t think we publish our enrollment data like this, but even if we did it would be fairly boring with numbers staying relatively constant from one year to the next. If you have detailed questions about Toronto’s data and where people go you will have to contact them.

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One thought on “Toronto Engineering Program Enrollments”

Hey Professor, here are my 2 cents on this.
Being an engineering student at UofT I can answer some questions.
The decline in mineral and material engineering is due to students switching out. It is very easy to switch programs at UofT (before 2nd year) hense the drop of students in mineral and materials.
Engsci is typically a very rigorous program, they have the option of dropping down to one of the core 8 engineering disciplines before a certain date.